Archive for the ‘Budget for 2012’ Category

Flying Not Quite as High

Our threatened airpower.

Michael Auslin

May 7, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 32

The release of the Obama administration’s defense budget in January makes clear just how the president intends to reshape the U.S. military. For starters, the Army will shrink 14 percent by 2017, the Marines will decrease by 20,000, six Air Force fighter squadrons will be deactivated, and the Navy will make do with fewer ships. Putting skin on this skeleton is the Defense Strategic Guidance, released in January at the Pentagon. Most significantly, the document calls for a shift of resources to Asia and promises that America will “maintain its ability to project power in areas in which our access and freedom to operate are challenged” by states like China and Iran. Yet in Secretary of Defense Panetta’s own words, U.S. forces will have to do this while facing “profound challenges” and relying on “low-cost and small-footprint approaches” to achieving national security objectives.

Unfortunately, the president’s goals cannot be met by the ends he proposes. In particular, the administration’s plans will demand a much greater role for the airpower capabilities of both the Air Force and Navy. Yet under current plans both services will see their qualitative and quantitative air edge over competitors shrink, as they lose airplanes, operate an aging force, and face greater threats from adversaries.

Already the functions of the Air Force underpin everything America’s Joint Force does, from surveillance to transport, and from close combat to cyber defense. Airpower advocates point to the sea- and land-based air destruction of Saddam Hussein’s military in the 1991 Gulf war, the 1999 Allied Force air campaign against Yugoslavia, and last year’s action in support of the Libyan rebellion as proof of how airpower can overcome an enemy’s order of battle, command and control, and warfighting spirit. At the same time, airpower dominance allows us to deploy minimal numbers of combat ground forces and reduces civilian casualties and collateral damage. (more…)

A Path to Security

Gary Schmitt and Thomas Donnelly

April 2, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 28EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: To be sure, these are only first steps toward undoing the damage of the Obama years. In 2009, President Obama’s first year in office—and while ramming an $800 billion “stimulus” bill through Congress—the White House directed $330 billion in defense cuts. The next year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates went looking for “efficiencies” to reinvest in priority programs; thank you, said the president, I’ll take another $100 billion from your budget. And under the 2011 BCA, Obama harvested $487 billion from the Pentagon, charging it with the full bill for cuts needed from all “security” accounts, as the law described them. So Barack Obama has racked up about $920 billion in defense cuts to date.

Rep. Paul Ryan calls his budget plan the “Path to Prosperity,” but it could be termed as well a “Path to Security.” In reclaiming more than $200 billion of the nearly $500 billion in military cuts made in last year’s Budget Control Act (BCA), the House Budget Committee chairman takes national security more seriously than does our commander in chief.

To be sure, these are only first steps toward undoing the damage of the Obama years. In 2009, President Obama’s first year in office—and while ramming an $800 billion “stimulus” bill through Congress—the White House directed $330 billion in defense cuts. The next year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates went looking for “efficiencies” to reinvest in priority programs; thank you, said the president, I’ll take another $100 billion from your budget. And under the 2011 BCA, Obama harvested $487 billion from the Pentagon, charging it with the full bill for cuts needed from all “security” accounts, as the law described them. So Barack Obama has racked up about $920 billion in defense cuts to date.

But the president wants more. Because the congressional “supercommittee” could not agree to the larger savings mandated in the budget control law, the president’s 2013 budget does nothing to keep the sequestration guillotine from coming down on October 1, chopping an automatic $55 billion per year out of defense budgets, allocated across each and every program. That would push the administration’s defense-cut total past $1.4 trillion. Though he commands troops involved in an ongoing war, Obama won’t lift a finger to avoid what his defense secretary has described as a catastrophe, unless taxes are raised. The net effect, as Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, is that the United States will no longer be a global power. (more…)

The GOP Budget and America’s Future

The president’s budget gives more power to bureaucrats, takes more from taxpayers to fuel the expansion of government, and commits our nation to a future of debt and decline.

Less than a year ago, the House of Representatives passed a budget that took on our generation’s greatest domestic challenge: reforming and modernizing government to prevent an explosion of debt from crippling our nation and robbing our children of their future.

Absent reform, government programs designed in the middle of the 20th century cannot fulfill their promises in the 21st century. It is a mathematical and demographic impossibility. And we said so.

We assumed there would be some who would distort for political gain our efforts to preserve programs like Medicare. Having been featured in an attack ad literally throwing an elderly woman off a cliff, I can confirm that those assumptions were on the mark.

But one year later, we can say with some confidence that the attacks have failed. Courageous Democrats have joined our efforts. And bipartisan opposition to the path of broken promises is growing.

And so Tuesday, House Republicans are introducing a new Path to Prosperity budget that builds on what we’ve achieved. (more…)

Three years into America’s post-World War II drawdown,not a single U.S. nuclear bomber could hit a large, undefended target in Ohio.

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: But it turned out that many of the planes couldn’t even take off. The best mechanics had left the service for higher-paying and easier civilian jobs after the war ended, leaving SAC’s planes in woeful condition. Of the planes that could get to Dayton, not one was able to hit the target. Not one. For obvious reasons, the results were kept classified……..The Dayton lesson serves as a cautionary tale. The next time some unforeseen event threatens the mainland as the U.S. is slashing its military budget, this country won’t have the luxury of time to rebuild what it will no doubt need.

It was simply called the “Dayton Exercise” and for obvious reasons it was kept secret for decades. It was also one of the clearest examples of the trouble the United States encounters when it decides to precipitously draw back its military in a troubled world.

At the end of World War II, the U.S. had the most modern and best-equipped military on earth. No one else came close. It had taken the entire war to build it, and at great sacrifice.

U.S. troops fought at a distinct disadvantage until 1944 because of an earlier self-imposed disarmament. But when the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing the Japanese surrender and preventing a land invasion of the Japanese islands, the U.S. abruptly demobilized again. It had done the same thing 27 years earlier, after World War I.

In the Army Air Forces alone (there was no independent Air Force until 1947), the number of men dropped to just over 300,000 in 1947 from 2.4 million in 1945. On the day the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, there were 218 combat groups in the Army Air Force and 70,000 planes. One year later, there were 52 groups—only two of which were considered combat-ready. The airplanes that American factories had churned out were parked end-to-end in the desert, sold to other countries or junked.

Never in history had one nation held such a strategic advantage over the rest of the world as the U.S. did in 1945, and never had a country been so reluctant to wield it. To many, the well-earned peace dividend appeared incontrovertible. Intelligence estimates assured the West that the Soviets would not be able to develop their own atomic weapon for at least 10 years. But a series of events quickly changed the strategic map.

As we head into some crucial GOP primaries — Arizona and Michigan on February 28, then Super Tuesday one week later — grassroots Republicans remain sharply divided over which presidential candidate to support. A lot of us would vote for None of the Above, if we had that choice. But we’re united in the belief that if our country continues on its present course for another four years, the damage to our economy and our national security will be catastrophic and irreversible.

And we’re perplexed by the obstinate refusal of so many Americans who aren’t Republicans to acknowledge the acute danger we’re in, and to at least consider voting in November for whichever candidate the GOP finally chooses to run against President Obama.

Is the problem that these people cannot see we’re heading toward a cliff? Or can they see it just as clearly as we do, but they hate the GOP so much that they would rather go over that cliff with a Democrat at the wheel than be saved by a Republican driver who’s made a last-minute U-turn?

My guess is that they do see we’re heading toward a cliff. After all, it’s obvious — and these people aren’t stupid. But they don’t believe we’re in immediate danger. More precisely, they cannot bring themselves to believe that. Which means they may acknowledge to themselves — but never aloud, to us, or to some pollster — that at some point they’ll need to vote for a U-turn. But not now, or any time soon, because they believe the cliff is still a long way down the road.

If this perception is accurate, it suggests a wholly new approach to the 2012 election — not just for whoever emerges as the GOP’s challenger to President Obama, but for Republican candidates at all levels of government. We should talk to voters the way a physician would talk to a patient who’s got some serious health problems: calmly and professionally, but bluntly: (more…)

The editors of HUMAN EVENTS are proud to name Rep. Paul Ryan as “Conservative of the Year” for 2011. The Wisconsin Republican was a favorite from the very beginning of the nomination process, not only with our editorial board but with our readers as well, for his relentless commitment to proposing bold, free-market reforms to rein in an out-of-control, ever-expanding government that is destroying the American economy. Despite the left’s vicious and unfounded attacks, Paul Ryan has pursued an agenda of limiting Washington’s control over our private property and the decisions we make, while eloquently arguing that true way out of poverty is through the benevolence of capitalist pursuits, not through the confiscatory paws of government bureaucrats. And who better to profile Ryan’s indefatigable journey than eminent financial columnist and popular television host Lawrence Kudlow. Congratulations, Paul Ryan.

When you think of Republican congressman Paul Ryan, terms like earnest, serious and important come to mind. So does the term old-fashioned. Ryan comes from an old-fashioned place, the blue-collar town of Janesville, Wisconsin. He cherishes the old-fashioned values of a faithful family man. He even looks old-fashioned, with his white shirts and striped ties. And he uses old-fashioned argument skills, persuasively weaving big-picture themes with the numbers that back them up.

And Ryan has old-fashioned goals, too, like saving America from fiscal bankruptcy, economic stagnation and a European-style entitlement state. (more…)